


for reasons wretched and divine

by supinetothestars



Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angst, Blood and Injury, Fight Clubs, Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Pagan Gods, Possession, Self-Esteem Issues, Technoblade-centric (Video Blogging RPF), Winged Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF), blood god as a literal god
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-13 04:07:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29520612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/supinetothestars/pseuds/supinetothestars
Summary: There were some nights when the blood god tried to bargain. "Let us in and you’ll never feel pain," it would purr. "You will never be afraid again - with the blood god behind you, no mortal could even hope to face you. You would be unstoppable. Would you like to be unstoppable, blade? Would you like to feel powerful?""I am powerful," Technoblade had countered, once, thinking of the way so many fighters had crumpled beneath the hilt of his axe or been sent sprawling under his fists. He was duelling pit’s reigning champion. Sixteen and the most skilled in a fighting ring frequented by adults, veterans, hardened warriors; they called him the blade, like a blunt force weapon in mortal form; a thing to behold; a terrible sight.The blood god had laughed and laughed and laughed. It was a horrific, ear-splitting noise, made all of dissonance and breaking glass and something poisonous. "Darling dearest," it had purred. "That's not power. That's just monstrosity."__[Or: An origin story. The blood god offers Technoblade a deal: its patronage, in exchange for Philza's life. Techno accepts.]
Relationships: No Romantic Relationship(s), Phil Watson & Technoblade - Relationship
Comments: 48
Kudos: 194





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> fyi: yes this takes place in an alternate universe where the blood god is in fact a literal god! techno is not a full piglin but he's got tusks n ears n shit because thats pog!
> 
> also title from hozier :)

The story goes like this: Technoblade became a warrior young. He was never a child; never a whimpering toddler with child-sized hands and drooping, velvet-soft, piglike ears; he never cried or learned to walk on shaky legs or stared at the world with wide-stretched, awe-filled eyes. These were things reserved for children, and to be a child was a luxury Techno was never afforded.

The people who remember him from his fight-club glory days will say that Technoblade has always carried that copper-smell of blood about him. He came into fame with an axe clasped in one hand, wearing armor already nicked and scraped by combat damage. His presence took the fighting rings by storm and his combat was fueled by bloodlust and greed for championship titles. He hacked apart enemy fighters without so little hesitation that the supervisors at each match had to drag away half his dying opponents, prying them out of his grasp like a deer ripped from the jaws of a mountain lion. They weren’t always quick enough, but the deaths, at least, weren’t slow.

(This is the story of Technoblade that comes to be told. He lets it live and he lets it be. Every living legend is given a creation myth, a pillar on which the people will place their sculpted marble image. And if even the people wish to build him up just to tear him down, he knows there are worse fates for people like him than to live one’s life obscured by their own shadow.) 

In reality Techno had been only sixteen when he’d escaped the duelling clubs. He can’t remember much before that, can’t remember how old he’d been when he’d first been brought in to fight. (He knows he’d been dragged along as a means of paying off old debts.) He remembers only little details, like that even the smallest armor they’d been able to give him had sat too large on his frame, had been all bulky and oversized. For months it had clunked up his movements and clashed around painfully as he’d tried to fight - but the chainmail chest-plates had come to fit him, eventually. (He had learned to fit them.)

There hadn’t been a smooth road out. Techno remembers those first few weeks of freedom like a blurry, abstracted haze of activity, of new sights and old worries and a bewildering sense of weightlessness around his shoulders even under the armor he buckled on every sunrise. Something about hearing the bird song every morning, something about how the light looked through the trees, something about eating food that wasn’t dried and salted.

Something about Philza, really. Most aspects of those hurried first few weeks are remembered vaguely, through a kind of hazy fog. Blurred around the edges. Philza isn’t; Techno remembers Philza’s face in the first few moments of their meeting as clearly as anything, can see the shadows of the corridor torchlight under Philza’s boots and the way his shoulders slumped under the weight of a travelling-bag. There’d been that trench-coat, too, suspiciously big and bulky. (Techno guessed that it was hiding something. For once, he was correct.) He remembers Philza’s eyes the clearest, because, bizarrely, they’d met his own; unflinching and unfrightened. 

Technoblade had a reputation, he’d been informed. Technoblade had an aura. Technoblade smelled of blood and rotten things and the dank air of underground fight club tunnels. He’d been fighting since as long as he could remember (that wasn’t saying much, as his memory fizzled into spaced-out distortions and discordant halfway scenes if he thought back more than a few years) and he’d been told he was a frightening thing to behold. Most people didn’t dare to meet his eyes. (The ones who did were never kind.) 

Philza met his eyes and held his gaze and looked him square in the face, dead on, and most bizarrely of all - he did it with this semi-awkward half-smile, a look of cautious politeness, as if they two were just strange men exchanging pleasantries in a hallway. As if Techno wasn’t walking back to the armory from a match, sword still wet with blood. As if the boar-skull mask wasn’t digging hard bone edges into his cheekbones, casting dour shadows across the stone walls of the hallway. As if Philza wasn’t, by the look of it, heading down that hallway as a potential champion. A potential enemy. (A potential victim.) 

There’d been an awkward beat, and Techno had tilted his head just slightly, dropping his hand from his sword to his side. Philza hadn’t tracked the motion. He’d been armed himself, but his hands were crossed casually across his chest as that awkward smile hung on his face.

“You looking for something?” Techno had asked. 

“Yeah,” Philza admitted, chuckling as if in humorous confession. “You happen to know where I could find the armory, mate?” 

“Headin there myself, actually,” Techno droned, and the next thing he’d known he’d been in the armory awkwardly attempting to fend off casual conversation with an unsettlingly calm man who was occupying himself by shining an unsettlingly battered diamond sword.

Philza explained that his name was Philza. Philza explained that he’d been travelling for some time, and only recently came upon this town and its inhabitants - Techno said he wasn’t surprised. (Philza asked why, and received no answer.) Philza explained that he wasn’t too fond of fight clubs, not in the least ones ‘of this sort.’

Techno had grunted his response. “Then why the hell’re you in a place like this?” 

“Debts caught up with me,” Philza had said. “Old and new. I’ve been rather forcefully informed that this is the only viable way to pay them off.” 

The story fit, so Techno let it be.

  
  


Weeks passed, and Philza came to be a familiar sight in the halls and in the armory and in the pit. He fought exactly twice and won exactly twice; his combat was brutal in a way that was surprising, but not unknown. There was a familiar bluntness about it, in the split-second instincts of a man who’d learned through survival. An adventurer, Philza had called himself, and Techno saw it in the force behind each axe-swing. That was the difference, between a man who’d learned in the wilderness and a man who’d learned in the pit. The latter knew what to expect from his enemies - always human, always armored, always clumsy with the anxiety of combat - and measured out his force appropriately. Gracefully.

The former never knew. The former met blows with blunt force instinct and an expectation of deadly violence. Wild things weren’t predictable combat partners, but Philza, who had learned to become their antithesis, was.

He fought well. Better than most (nearly all). Philza crept up the rankings in the short time he spent in the pit, scratching his way into the edges of the leaderboards. Every point he won he neared him to the day he’d be in the pit opposite Techno - a day that Techno anticipated with a kind of feverish, muted anxiety.

Techno wasn’t worried that he would lose. He was afraid of what would happen when he won. He liked Philza, even then, against his better instincts - liked the casual conversation, often one-sided (Techno wasn’t skilled at carrying a discussion) but never forced; liked the way that Philza always met his eyes, and never shrunk away from the shadows they were cast into by the boar-skull mask; enjoyed the consistency of Philza’s company in the armory. Like a fool he’d gone and gotten himself attached to the man, to a stranger in a suspiciously large trench-coat and a low green hat.

Well. Philza’s loss.

(“I expect I'll be out of town fairly soon,” Philza commented once, as a silent Techno slotted an arrow into his crossbow and pulled the string tight. He sounded almost hopeful. “Once I’ve gone up in the pit a few more times they can’t exactly keep holding me here, can they? Debts will be paid fair and proper.”

Techno’s arrow slipped from his fingers right as he set it loose and buried itself thoroughly to the left of the target. He ignored it in favor of glancing at where Philza sat at a bench to his left.

“That’s not really how things work around here,” he grunted.

There was a beat of silence, and then that earned him a sigh and a tightly frustrated smile. “Thought you’d say that.” 

Techno frowned and glanced back towards the crossbow target. His unasked question still went answered. “I just don’t look forward to fighting my way out of here the hard way,” Philza commented. 

_The hard way_ , he’d said, and Techno had assumed he’d meant through trial combat in the dueling pit. 

Techno, as he often was in regards to Philza, was incorrect.) 

Philza asked a few times why Techno stayed to fight. Why he’d spent so many years in a place that rank and dark. 

“They took me in when I was a kid,” Techno had explained. “I fought to pay off debts, like you.” 

“It’s been years, from the sound of it. Why the hell’d you stay, mate?” 

_I don’t know where else to go_ , Techno didn’t say. _I don’t know if I could live anywhere else. I don’t know if anywhere else could live with me._

Instead he notched his crossbow again and fired a shot. Philza never got his answer.

Here was the difference, Techno knew, between himself and Philza: Philza had never heard the voices. Never dreamt of chanting, muffled mumbling, rabid snarls and screeched-out threats. He hadn’t heard the voices that lurked in Techno’s dreamscape and crept into his consciousness as he slept, emerging from the shadows of his bedroom-corners and slipping through his dreams. The voices that snarled at him to feed them. Appease them. Create them. Accept them.

_We are the blood god,_ the voices always chanted. _Let us in. Let us in. Let us in._

Every time he woke they receded into the background, trapped beneath his waking consciousness. Every time he slept they returned. (Pleaded. Begged. Threatened. Insulted.) _Accept us,_ they entreated him. _Let us in._

_Let us help you._

Often in Techno’s dreams he stood in the duelling pit of the fight club, red smeared across his hands and blood dripping from his axe, and he met faceless figure after faceless figure in a deadly embrace. Everything went too quickly, too blurred, too abstract for him to fight his way to victory; again and again he felt the sting of swords and axes and arrow-points slipping past his guard, slicing between the cracks in his armor. Enemy after faceless enemy poured through the gates of the pit and each one lunged, weapons extended, with wordless snarls and shrieks and screams. The bodies would pile higher and higher as the dream went on, until Techno’s boots were slipping on the blood, and his arms were weary and his breath came in frantic pants and he dodged and weaved and still was cut to the bone, time and time again. Never fast enough. Never smart enough. Never strong enough.

_Let us in,_ the voices urged him. _The blood god is powerful. The blood god will help you. The blood god will end all of this._

There were days when Techno longed to accept. Anything for a minute of sleeping silence; the world for a dreamless night. His nose was always clogged with the scent of blood when he woke. Limbs aching with phantom cuts. Screams tangled in his ears and snarls caught in his throat.

He never accepted. He never let the voices in. He knew better than to make deals with godly things, no less ones who fed themselves on dead things and violence and the act of killing. He knew better than to embrace a thing that crowded itself into his sleeping head and filled his dreams with chanted snarls, half-incomprehensible, half-foul. 

There were nights when the blood god tried to bargain. _Let us in and you’ll never feel pain,_ it purred, as day after day he went to bed riddled with combat injuries - struggled to sleep through aching weariness and the stinging of poorly bandaged wounds. Wishing for nothing more than a day of peace. A day of rest. A day without challenge. _You will never be afraid again - with the blood god behind you, no mortal could even hope to face you. You would be unstoppable. Would you like to be unstoppable, blade? Would you like to feel powerful?_

_I am powerful,_ Technoblade had countered, once, thinking of the way so many fighters had crumpled beneath the hilt of his axe or been sent sprawling under his fists. He was duelling pit’s reigning champion. Sixteen and the most skilled in a fighting ring frequented by adults, veterans, hardened warriors; they called him the blade, like a blunt force weapon in mortal form; a thing to behold; a terrible sight.

The blood god had laughed and laughed and laughed. It was a horrific, ear-splitting noise, made all of dissonance and breaking glass and something poisonous. _Darling dearest,_ it had purred. _That's not power. That's just monstrosity._

At that point in the dream a scourge of faceless enemies had broken through the walls of the pit and everything had abstracted itself beneath the haze of flashing metal and the slippery red liquid spreading across the floor, and at that point in the dream Techno’s gait had slipped upon hearing the very last word - _monstrosity_ \- and in his lapse of attention he’d been flung back against the stone-brick walls and a blade had been pressed to his throat and just like that, the rumbling of broken-glass laughter had vanished and taken everything else with it.

(He’d woken up screaming that night. No one had heard.) 

  
  


“Are you a religious man, Philza?” Techno asked one morning, as he stood in the armory and examined an arrow-quiver. Philza, hunched on a bench with a bucket of grimy water, absently scrubbed a bloodstain out of a battered iron chestplate. 

Philza had glanced over at him and blinked, tilted his head, considered the answer.

“Not particularly,” Philza said. “I mean, I have no patron deities, if that’s what you’re asking. I’ve met many who do, but - I never took it up, myself. Busy man and all that.” 

_Never took it up myself,_ he’d said, as if it was some kind of hobby one obtains at a dollar market. Techno resisted the urge to scoff.

He could feel Philza’s eyes on him and determinedly did not meet them. Instead he squinted at an arrow fletching and focused on smoothing it out. “The people who did,” he grunted, and paused to think before continuing. “How did they - how did that work?” 

“Don’t reckon I'm the best person to ask, mate. I don’t know shit about that sort of thing. But you know, mostly just a matter of - prayer and tradition, innit? Calling upon a higher force for aid.” 

“Prayer and tradition,” Techno repeats, and the words sound unfamiliar on his tongue. So different from the haunting, screeching thing that spoke to him in nightmares. The blood god was more a desperate animal than a deity with an altar to pray upon.

Philza, humming an affirmation, returned to scrubbing at his armor.

  
  


The longer Philza stayed at the duelling club the more Techno wanted him gone. Every fight the man had he’d won; each match climbed him higher up the leaderboards. Nearer to Techno’s name. Nearer to the day they’d meet in combat. 

Techno wanted him gone. 

Techno told Philza as much, once, when it became clear that in a short few rounds they’d be called upon to fight each other. “You should run,” he’d grunted. “Your debts will never be paid anyway. That's not how this place works. The better you are, the harder they try to keep you here. Just get out while you can.” 

“Scared of losing against me in a fight, mate?” Philza had asked, seeming amused. “it’s all in good sport, man, you know that. I wouldn't beat you down too badly once I've won.” 

Techno didn’t respond.

( _Are you scared of losing?_ the blood god asked him that night, as he knelt in an abstracted, flickering field of grass. His dreamscape was unusually peaceful, for once; there was no fighting pit to be found. No smell of blood or enemies to fight; just sky above him and an empty, flat horizon.

Techno had scoffed. _No._

_But you are afraid._

He turned the axe over in his hands, studying its smoothness against the roughened skin of his palms. _Not of losing._

There had been a quiet rumble, as if of understanding. _You are frightened of what will happen when you win. Even a monster can comprehend his own brutality._

Techno ignored the voices in favor of running a finger along the sharpened edge of the dreamscape-axe, testing its deadliness. A feather-light touch against the blade. (The voices were acting strange, today. Unusually calm, unusually united; they spoke nearly as a singular voice, instead of the usual cacophony.) 

_Let us tell you a secret_ , the voices murmured. _The man you are afraid will learn to fear you? The angel one, with the faded-coal wings?_

An angel man with faded-coal wings. _I have no idea what you’re talking about,_ Techno responded. (Philza had no wings. Only an oddly bulky trench coat and a fondness for the open air.)

The voices ignored him. _He is deadlier than you know. A monster-slayer, they call him. A slaughterer of beasts._

Techno turned the axe on its side and caught a glimpse of something in the smooth-metal panel of the blade. His own reflection, caught in frigid steel.

_And what are you, Technoblade, if not a beast?_

Even through the marred distortions wrought by the curve of the axe, Techno could see in the image that his eyes were coal-black voids and the boar-skull mask he wore during fights was plastered to his face, gaunt and skeletal, digging into his cheekbones. His own tusks connected with the bleached bone of the mask, linking his face with the animal skull. Techno froze in a wave of cold shock, then dropped the axe into the dreamscape-grass and stumbled to his feet.

_How cruel, that the monster should come to love a man who can only slaughter it_ , the voices whispered. They were growing louder, now. More insistent. _How terrible, that is. How horrific a fate._

_If only you would let yourself be saved._

Techno lifted his hands, shaking and unsteady, to the sides of his face. His claws scraped against bone and flesh and as he notched his fingers under the cheekbones of the mask, struggling to lift it away from his skin, it wouldn’t move. The bone staying firmly affixed against his skin.

The voices began to chant at him again. Growing aggressive and insistent. _We can help you, Technoblade. We can slaughter the beast-killer. We can save you from a fate worse than death._

_I’m not an animal,_ Techno heard himself say, but the mask wouldn’t come free from his face, and all at once he realized the two were one and the same, and his tusks were suddenly red with blood and the velvet-softness of his pointed ears felt hideously wrong and he knew he wasn’t all-human, never had been, but there was blood beginning to bubble up from the dirt around him amid the gentle grass of the meadow. Everything became distorted and everything became wrong and there was bile rising in his throat.

When he woke he was in his bed. Sitting bolt upright before he was aware he’d left his dream. His clawed fingers were clasped against the side of his face, scratching divots into his skin. He touched a fingertip to one tusk and it came away bloodless and clean, without a single trace of red, but even with this confirmation Techno still couldn’t find it in himself to breathe.

The boar-skull mask sat on his bedside table. Its hollow eyes stared at him, condemning in their emptiness.)


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Philza won his next fight. It was a brutal victory to watch, startling, with a quickness that neared cruelty.

Philza won his next fight. It was a brutal victory to watch, startling, with a quickness that neared cruelty. The fight was over nearly before it had begun, and even so Techno could see in each movement the way that Philza held himself back - each blow was halfway committed, each duck a moment slow. Phil still moved with that kind of instinctual bluntness that Techno had noticed in his first few duels, but here it became almost muted, in a way, as if he was consciously putting himself on a back burner. 

It didn’t make much of a difference, as the opponent was still left crumpled, wheezing, against the stone pit floor. The dramatics of his victory had the crowd going buck-wild, caught up with the uncontrollable kind of rabid fervor that Techno was unused to hearing directed at any victory but his own.

When leaderboard scores updated Philza’d reached the slot right by Techno’s, adjacent in the rankings. (They’d be scheduled to duel in a matter of days.)

Techno’s hands unconsciously curled into a fists when he saw. Something cold snaked under his skin and brought him to shivers. The bone mask was off his face, replaced by a low hood to keep himself from being spotted by the crowd - even behind the barred doors of the champion waiting room, placed at the top of a set of stairs above the duelling dungeon - but he felt as though he could still feel its ridges against his cheekbones.

“Good match,” he grunted, once Philza had fought his way through the crowds and into the empty prepping room. It was dank behind the guarded bars, with low-lit torches and armor thrown messily on armor stands lined along the walls, but Techno could still see Philza’s expressions clearly as he stepped through the barred gate. 

The man casted him a smile, friendly but muted with clear weariness, and immediately took to stripping off his armor-plates to discard on a nearby stand. “It was an alright match, yeah,” he agreed. “Could’a done better.”

Techno didn’t respond, but also didn’t disagree.

“But - I’ve been thinking about what you said, mate. That thing about how if you’re good they won’t want to let you to leave this place. Don’t like the sound of that.”

Techno thought he understood. “You’re worried you won’t get out of here.”

That earned him a distracted laugh. “Not at all. Just not gonna make it more violent by having them try to stop me. Don’t need even more of a name for myself around these parts.”

“Even more?”

Philza finally clipped the last shoulder-guard onto the armor stand and swivelled to face Techno. His expression was one of slight curiosity, veiled interest; he regarded Techno under furrowed brows and a thoughtful look.

“You don’t get out of this shithole too often, do you, Techno?”

Techno recalled the last time he visited the outside town. It was in the evening, a week or two prior; he’d gone to pick up some iron with which to fix a dent in his axe. The streets had been loud and crowded and the sunlight had hovered uncomfortably on the back of his neck, and people had given his tusks strange looks in the middle of the street. He had eventually taken the iron and returned to the fight club without lingering long, and found one of his handlers waiting for him with a look of disapproval. A biting comment on his absence. A  _ we don’t pay you, house you, keep you, just for you to leave whenever you feel like it, Blade. _

Techno’s handlers were never frightened of him. There were times he wished they would be. Anything to keep that tone of voice from creeping into their tones and nipping at his heels like a dog’s.

“I leave sometimes,” he responded, voice sharp-cut and brief. “To get supplies.”

Philza had given him this infuriating look of  _ I thought you’d say that _ and shouldered his pack from where it’d been draped over a hook in the corner. He shifted to adjust the weight and glanced away from Techno. “Let’s just say that for a man who dislikes being known, I’m unfortunately good at making a name for myself,” he explained, reaching over to the doorframe at his side and resting a hand against it as he glanced back to gesture Techno to his side. “Let’s walk and talk.”

Philza was already half out the door, so Techno had obliged him by following as requested.

“I saw we’re up next on the schedule,” Philza commented. He sounded largely unconcerned. “Looking forward to it, mate?”

“Not particularly,” Techno grunted.

Philza’s laugh sounded absent-minded, more out of politeness than anything. “We’ve been over this. Again, I’m no cruel winner.”

“You’re very confident,” Techno hummed. “I’ve been at the top of the leaderboards since my preteens. Practically undefeated.”

“Since your prete -” Philza stopped midsentence, sounding incredulous, and stopped walking to wheel around and stare at Techno. “Mate. Say you’re kidding. How fuckin long have you been fighting here, man? Decades?”

Techno had come to a dead stop. He stared at Philza blankly, taken aback by the other man’s tone. “A few years, I’d guess,” he grunted, thinking it out as he spoke. “I’m not entirely sure.”

Philza’s face abruptly went pale. His eyebrows drew down, again, across his face, and his eyes stayed fixed on Techno - eerily focused - the attention made something on the back of Techno’s neck prickle with discomfort.

“Technoblade,” Philza said, words slow as if he was fighting to get them out all in order, “how old are you?”

Techno blinked at him. “Sixteen. Give or take.”

The last of the blood seemed to have drained from Philza’s face - a cold kind of horror settling into his features that a moment later morphed into anger. Techno recognized the signs of fury, flinty and familiar, and on instinct he took a few steps back. Cautiously slipped his hands into loose fists at his sides.

_ I’ve made a mistake _ , he was distantly aware.  _ I’ve made him angry. _

“Motherfucker,” Philza said, fury sharp in all the corners of his tone, and he was stalking away to disappear down the hall before Techno could think to follow.

  
  


( _ Why me _ , Techno found himself asking, when that night his dreams were plunged into darkened halls and haunted by those shadowed figures, silhouetted in every darkened window-corner:  _ Why do you haunt me, of all people?  _

A figure dove at him from around the hall, its silver blade cutting dangerously near Techno’s exposed throat. He ducked away and wrapped his hand around the back of the figure’s neck - fingers warm against the skin, the only contact he’d felt in weeks and it was with this semi-shadow, never-human dream thing - and pulled it close. He drew his axe up behind him and slipped his hand away, replaced with the cold flint of steel blade. The shadow-figure crumpled without time to scream.

There was blood all over his hands, now. It was running down his clothes and splattered on his face. He stumbled back, thrown off balance by the rhythm of the attack, and found himself propped against a wall. His breath coming in uneven heaves.

The blood god’s voices hummed their response.  _ Common ground _ , it told him.

Whatever the hell that meant.)

  
  


Techno was caught off-guard when Philza still arrived in the armory the next morning. He wasn’t sure what reaction to expect, after the unfamiliar glint of anger that had crept into Philza’s side of their conversation the night before, but he shifted and held himself cautiously at the sound of leather boots approaching. He glanced up, to better view the doorway opposite his bench, and found himself resisting the urge to set aside the sword he was polishing and rise to a more defense-ready stance.

That measure didn’t prove necessary. Philza entered quietly, and managed to avoid looking at Techno for a few valuable seconds as he absorbed himself with the removal of a large, bulky trenchcoat to expose the smaller, just-as-bulky trench coat underneath.

“Techno,” Philza finally acknowledged, once his coat was cast across a nearby armor stand. 

“Philza,” Techno droned, picking absently at the iron hilt of the sword.

Philza shuffled closer, shifting his hand to rest at the empty sword-sheath at his belt. “We should talk,” he said, and there was an odd tone in his voice - a tone that had Techno glancing up despite himself.

“Eh?”

“Gonna be honest here, Techno,” Philza began, and he cut himself off with an odd sounding laugh before restarting. “Sorry for storming off last night. Just - mate, I thought you were, like, a real skinny twenty-something. With the way you fight and all those sca -” He stopped and began again. “Just that by the way people talk about you round here - sixteen, man, actually?”

The uncomfortable, sickly feeling from the night before returned. Techno shifted slightly on the bench and nodded. 

“That’s pretty young to be the resident champion in a place like this, man.” There was a strained note to the words.

“Thanks,” Techno said, though Philza’s tone wasn’t that of a compliment. 

Philza gave that odd-toned laugh again. “Kid, I have a son older than you, did you know? I just - I’d hate to see him fighting these kinds of fights. It’s fucking brutal down here. I wouldn’t want him even  _ around _ these people.”

“I’ll tell him to give you my condolences if we ever meet,” Techno said, and his voice was deadpan, but he couldn’t quite keep the sharpened corner out of his tone.

Philza ignored him. “Why’d you say you stick around here again, mate? They got you in on debts, was it?”

“Debts were paid off a long while ago,” Techno told him, looking back down at the weapon across his lap. “I just stick around. It works out alright.”

“This is - sixteen and fighting duels with grown adults every night and you’re all  _ it works out alright _ . The fuck.”

Techno casted the floor a disagreeing frown. “You’ve seen me fight. You know I can more than handle it.”

Philza just looked at him for a long moment. 

“Think on it,” he said, as though there was anything to think on. “How about you come into the town with me on some errands,” he continued. “Just for a day.”

Techno, ever the fool, accepted.

\--

Philza took him further out of the city than he’d ever gone, and Techno found he’d never seen anything quite as beautiful as a meadow on the outskirts of town town on a mid-summer evening, thick with the humming of june-bugs late to their harvest, heavy with the honey-thick gold of sunlight. The grass swayed with a wind that smells of fresh dirt and a bountiful harvest from the farmlands visible in the distance and the unmistakable scent of  _ people, _ thickly corralled like sheep in a pen, from the cobblestone structures of the town, visible in the distance behind them. 

He sat - half crumpled - firmly in the grass, heavy and overwhelmed with the sense that he couldn’t stand up if he tried. His head was spinning. Techno didn’t think he’d ever seen this much color.

“Like I said,” Philza said, voice coming from somewhere behind him. “Seems like you don’t get out of that club much.”

His voice was teasing, upturned at the edges with humor, but Techno could feel the sadness in it. (Or maybe that sadness was coming from that desperate thing behind his ribs. The heartbeat muffled by the iron armor still clasped tightly against his limbs.)

“I’ve - I’ve never been out of the city limits,” Techno said, and his voice wavered as he watched the open sky. (He  _ had _ been out of the city limits. Something in him knew this; something in him remembered a time Before, a time of childhood and open meadows and the sound of wagon-wheels receding away down a cobbled city path, never to be heard again. But times Before didn’t matter now, in his world of darkened tunnels and musty stone and a championship crown too heavy to ever lift from his head. Times Before had nothing left to offer him.)

Philza’s boots stepped up to stand next to him, accompanied by the slight crunch of grass underfoot. “Have now,” he said, and the smile was still in his voice. “Like it, huh?”

“It’s nice,” Techno said faintly, dimly aware that he was still sitting in the dirt in the midst of a meadow, legs before him and eyes wide at the mere presence of a sky. Dimly aware that this was not appropriate behavior for a sixteen year old in borrowed iron armor, for the resident champion of the city’s most well-established fight club, for the would-be host of the snarling ancient voices of a blood god. Dimly aware that he did not care about any of these things, only how wonderful and faintly flower-scented the air was.

Philza stepped around him, then lowered himself into a sitting position across from Techno, a few paces away. He was front-lit by the setting sun, so Techno could see the melancholy bittersweetness in his smile.

“I want to talk to you about something, Techno,” Philza began. Techno tore his eyes away from the distant swaying of the trees to look at him. Meet his eyes. (It was still a strange sensation, to be able to look at someone else and neither flinch nor be met by fear.)

Philza let out a long, slow breath. “I’m leaving town tomorrow - heading northeast, back to the old homestead. I wanted to talk to you before I go,” he said.

_ Leaving town tomorrow _ . Some part of Technoblade was aware that this was a good thing. A desired thing. Something he’d been wanting, hoping for, awaiting with a feverish kind of semi-panic. (Another part of him felt a pounding low in his ears and a muted snapping to reality, like the charmed honey of the outdoor air had drained away in the time it took Phil to break that news.)

Techno didn’t let it show. He just looks at Phil through blank eyes and tilts his head - a prompting to continue.

“Come with me,” Phil urged.

Techno was hit by the rush of dizziness that is missing a step on the stairs, missing a hit mid axe-swing and being sent spinning the rest of the way around, stepping into a room and forgetting his purpose. He blinked at Phil through slightly-furrowed brows. “Huh?”

“This is no place for a child, Techno.”

“I’m no child,” Techno snapped.

“No,” Phil acknowledged. “You’re not. But you’re young, and - you deserve better than to spend the rest of your potential left to rot here, Techno. If I found my son locked in a place like this I would raze the city to the ground.” There’s something steely in that gentled tone of voice. Something in the edges that rings too true for comfort. Techno knows this should be a lie, but it rings in his ears like a reality.

“Come with me,” Phil said again.

Techno dropped his eyes from Phil’s face to watch the grass beneath him.  _ Philza doesn’t realize _ , he was aware, desperately and horribly.  _ He doesn’t realize what he’s attempting to befriend. _

His chest ached horribly with the weight of it and the sting of Philza’s eyes against his neck. He forced in another breath and pushed away the spinning sensation in his stomach.

“I can’t,” Techno said, and prayed Philza wouldn’t ask why.

Philza, ever the kindest, asked why.

“I’m not -” Techno paused to breathe. “I can’t leave, you don’t understand. I wouldn’t-” he scrambled for reasons that wouldn’t change that kind look in Philza’s eyes and came up nearly empty. “You’ve seen me fight.”

“You’re very talented,” Philza acknowledged. “You’d make a worthy partner in combat. A good man to travel with.”

“But you’ve  _ seen _ me fight,” Techno repeated, almost desperately, as if hoping Philza would catch on to what he could not say. The voices of the blood god were muted, in his waking hours, but some note of their discordance seemed to be creeping beneath his ears and feeding the shivery unease growing in his chest. 

He met Philza’s eyes and found they held no disgust. 

“Come with me, Techno,” Philza said again. “Come on, mate. You’re just a kid. You didn’t deserve any of this, you know?  _ Come with me. _ ”

Techno breathed in and found the air smelled of flowers and living things and crushed grass. He breathed out and found the shivers had vanished from his chest, leaving only an oddly soothing stillness. He thought of the duelling pits, of the cobblestone-and-spruce city behind him and the battered old armor digging hard edges into the dirt below him, and he thought of the voices and the nightmares and the blood that dripped from his hands in every dream, and he looked at his hands now and found them clean but for the streaks of meadow dirt from where he had dug them into the grass. 

He thought of all this and thought of Phil, and tried to find it in himself to refuse.

The two of them were out of the city before nightfall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> leave comments or i find u
> 
> thank u to [fensandmarshes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fensandmarshes/pseuds/fensandmarshes) for betaing this fic. now go read his fics they slap

**Author's Note:**

> leave comments or else


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